Growth in demand for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) is driving the development of new technology to provide higher throughput. To a greater extent this growth is due to the increased number of users and applications desiring wireless transmission and to a lesser extent to the emergence of new applications needing higher transmission rates along a single connection between two points. Previous work has focused on increasing link throughput. This is necessary for single-stream high throughput applications. While it helps increase aggregate throughput, it is not the only way to do so. A MAC-based approach that enables the parallel use of multiple channels in a BSS, or a wireless mesh, can increase aggregate throughput.
IEEE 802.11 has been allocated multiple non-overlapping channels. (i.e., 3 channels are available in the 2.4 GHz ISM RF band for 802.11b/g and 12 channels in the 5 GHz U-NII RF band for 802.11a). These channels can be used simultaneously, if the transmitter of one channel and the receiver of the other have sufficient separation between them to render negligible any interference (referred to as adjacent channel interference or ACI) that would result from energy from the transmitter side lobes spreading out across the spectrum onto the other channel. When co-locating multiple radios in the same station, the interference arising when a station receives and transmits simultaneously on adjacent (in the RF spectrum) channels is so high that it blocks reception. Multiple radios are useful in increasing node-processing rates in stations where high traffic concentration is expected.